PRISM: A Framework for Authoring Interactive Narratives

The advances in computing technologies enable the computer users to create and share their own stories to the community at large. However, it is still regarded as complicated and laborious to author interactive narratives, where a story adapts as the user interacts with it. In authoring interactive narratives, two main approaches—branching graphs and AI planning—have been significantly used to augment interactivity into conventional linear narratives. Although each approach offers its own possibilities and limitations, few efforts have been made to blend these approaches. This paper describes a framework for authoring interactive narratives that employs an adapted branching narrative structure that also uses planning formalism to enable automated association between nodes. We expect that our work is valuable for non-expert users as well as AI researchers in interactive storytelling who need to create a large quantity of story contents for varied endings for a story.